Download free shapefile maps

Thousands of shapefile maps can be downloaded for free from the following websites, including country shapefiles, shapefiles at province or state level, and other administrative boundaries maps. The shapefile (or ESRI shapefile) format is a geospatial vector format, and is one of the most commonly used map formats.

WORLD shapefile maps

Natural Earth - world maps - Excellent world shapefile maps with national boundaries, first order admin (provinces, states, etc.), disputed areas, coastlines, populated areas and more at various scale levels.

GADM - Another great world shapefile map, which comes with multiple administrative layers.

COUNTRY shapefile maps

GADM - Recently updated shapefile maps for all countries. For an alternative source based on GADM, but which also includes roads, railroads, altitude and land cover, see DIVA-GIS.

Open Street Map - A growing collection of shapefile map downloads by continent, region and country. These maps are community edited and are not always complete. Various open street map shapefiles are also available from VDS tech.

Download country shapefile maps

Free country shapefile maps can be downloaded below, which have already been integrated into StatPlanet. Maps indicated with an asterisk (*) are Flash maps rather than shapefile maps. Please note that not all country versions are using the latest version of StatPlanet. To update the country version to the latest version, please see the update instructions.

Setting up a shapefile map in StatPlanet

1. Once you have downloaded StatPlanet, find the folder 'Shapefile_map' and then go to the sub-folder 'map'.
2. Remove the included example map files, and copy your own shapefiles here.
3. Rename your files (e.g. xxx.shp and xxx.dbf) to map.shp and map.dbf. Only these files are required.
4. Open the StatPlanet_data_editor file. Click on the button 'Setup shapefile' (in the top-left).
5. Select the map.dbf file in the 'map' sub-folder, and follow the instructions.
6. Run StatPlanet.exe or StatPlanet.html to see the results with the included sample data.

You can now start importing your own data for the map.

The font and interface components can be customized through the Excel sheet 'Settings'.